When the 2010 elk hunting season kicks off in less than one month, a significant portion of those hunters will be aiming for a cow elk.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife this year issued 133,600 either-sex and cow elk licenses including some 93,000 cow-only tags.

That’s a lot of opportunity, but sometimes it’s an opportunity that goes unwanted.

“The last couple of years we’ve had more than 10,000 licenses that went unsold,” said Mary Lloyd of the Division of Wildlife’s licensing section.

Some of those are private land tags, some are late-season, some just aren’t noticed for some reason.

But it’s been worse.

A few years ago, before the division started paring some licenses for units that went unsold on a regular basis, you might have 20,000 or more licenses standing forlornly at the end of the hunting season.

“We cut back many of those licenses for several reasons,” Lloyd said. “In some units, we reduced the license quota because there were surplus licenses every year.”

Some of those high number of licenses had their origin in the years from roughly 1998 to 2004, when the division made a concerted effort to reduce elk populations in western Colorado.

Although elk numbers were really high in northwest Colorado, ranchers and landowners across the Western Slope voiced complaints about there being too many elk.

In 1998, with elk numbers statewide reaching close to 255,000 animals, the division made its opening move by issuing unlimited over-the-counter, either-sex elk tags.

Although that increased the cow harvest by more than 7,000 over the prior year, it also had a significant side effect: So many unexperienced hunters were chasing cow elk they forgot to make sure of their target.

More than 16 moose illegally were killed when hunters mistook the large-nosed ungulates for cow elk.